Hi there! This is TITLE-ABS-KEY(“science journalism“), a newsletter about science journalism research. In the previous issue, I rated potential applications of AI algorithms in journalism and more specifically science journalism using a traffic lights system, and that was fun.
This time, I am again taking a break from reading other people’s papers, but this time it’s to talk about what I hope soon will be my own paper. (Got chills from writing this.)
Today’s not a paper buuuut one day: Instructional Design in SciComm and Science Journalism Training: Lessons from the Field.
Why: I went to the PCST Symposium on scicomm education and training in Venice to talk about my experience in, well, scicomm education and training. This is a review of what I presented as well as some thoughts on the way forward.
Abstract: A flourishing national community of science communicators and journalists has to rely on an infrastructure for continuing professional development. Yet university and EdTech instructors working with scicomm and science journalism in languages other than English often face a dearth of resources and contextualized methodology and thus have to design and implement their programs 'from scratch', essentially shaping the nascent market for scicomm professionals. Compounding this, they are often themselves practitioners and may lack the instructional design skills needed to build effective educational products.
This was the experience in Russia, where Olga Dobrovidova, the author of this abstract, worked for over five years. Ms Dobrovidova has been writing about policy-relevant science as a journalist for more than a decade and teaching original scicomm and science journalism courses in Russian and English at multiple Russian universities and abroad. She has been in charge of journalism training for Russia's first Master's Program in Science Communication at ITMO University since its start in 2016, and co-authored the country’s first MOOC in science communication, which ran successfully over more than 10 iterations.
This presentation will present an overview of instructional design insights applied to scicomm and related disciplines. It will also include a case study in meta-instruction about the two-hour workshop Teaching SciComm: Lessons from the Field held at OpenSciComm 2022 in November 2022. The workshop was in itself an instructional design product, illustrating these insights and inviting attendees to reflect on them from their own experience.
So I want to talk a bit about this (and not just because I had very little time to read other people’s research in the last two weeks because I was too busy preparing for the symposium and juggling other work.) The headline of this email is an homage to a great book called Writing is Designing, which I found quite useful in upgrading my own thinking about texts and writing. And I confess it took me a while to realize that I had felt teaching could be looked at as designing too even before I read it.
I initially became interested in instructional design through several courses and one in particular, from LLLab, which was incidentally really well designed. That was my first impression from their course: oh wow, so these people know what they are doing and are actually practicing what they preach, and this is how it feels like to be a student in a well-designed course. Okay!
I became so inspired by their approach that I redesigned not just the one educational product we were supposed to tackle in the setting of that course, but everything I’ve taught really, at least to some extent. It felt a bit like magic, to be honest, or like finally putting on a tailored garment after years of struggling with just slightly wrong sizes off the rack. I’m not saying my courses were bad; they were fine and I stand behind everything I’ve taught, but redesigning made them so much better. And students seemed to like the upgrades too.
Alas, now that’s all over because I stopped teaching my courses in Russia, and this is my first October in quite a while without any classes and lectures. I admit I’m still sad and nostalgic even though this decision was made months ago, so perhaps I should say thanks to Past Olga who had submitted her abstract to the PCST Symposium in Venice and arranged the trip.
Putting on instructional design goggles also helped me see how much I’ve changed and grown as an instructor – from getting heartburn every time I thought about speaking in front of a class (master’s students! with experience! who will definitely be smarter than me and will expose me as the impostor that I am!) to selling and delivering a workshop for the World Health Organisation without batting an eye. So I was confident that reflecting on almost a decade of teaching and training in Russia (now that it’s over) would also help me understand what I want to do next.
Finally, the Symposium agenda implied that the insights that I have gathered as part of a superstar team at ITMO University and elsewhere could be genuinely useful. And indeed, the ‘warm up’ sessions in the first days described a landscape that felt vaguely familiar: leading universities and research organizations in Europe and globally are essentially in a scicomm arms race, looking to out-communicate their competition and position themselves at the top in public engagement and research for impact.
One session, right before we split into working groups for discussions, featured senior administrators from several of those organizations who talked about increased demand for communication specialists and listed their asks, that is, the skills they’d like their communicators to have. And it ended up being the usual laundry list of everything, everywhere all at once, with a side of “Oh, and also you might all need to become prompt engineers for AI!“
Looking for a superhero to take up a super demanding and likely not super well-paid job is nothing new; that’s often the next stage after clueless misunderstanding of what science communication even is and how it works. I know because I’ve seen this in action in Russia. First, we had to explain that science communication is not about writing better academic papers or press releases about breaking ground on a new university canteen. Then we had to explain, very patiently, that just as you don’t really expect one doctor to treat both your cavities and your kidney stones, one science communicator can hardly excel at the job of a whole department (some can but they usually want a lot of money for that, and a department might actually be cheaper.)
That was basically the demand side of scicomm training and practice in Russia, at least in universities: little grasp of context and nuances, lots of money fueled by 5-100 (apparently aka the Russian Academic Excellence Project). Research institutes didn’t really have the money, and their administrators would often be perplexed as to why they might even need a full-time employee for something that’s always been done by that one perky and enthusiastic junior scientist who quite enjoys it, actually, so there’s no need to pay.
On the supply side, we had a few great and sometimes stellar practitioners with admittedly little to no background in education; a few amazing forward-looking program administrators; and basically zero existing resources in the Russian language. When I talk about this, I like to expressly list what we’ve done as a community simply because we had very little material in Russian: translated three books and two MOOCs, built our own six-week MOOC that ran more than a dozen times, as well as countless other online webinars and courses, made five reviews of best practices, designed and taught dozens of courses all over Russia. We needed this stuff, so we translated it and we created what we could not borrow anywhere.
Needless to say, this was more than slightly chaotic, as is the case with everything you build from the ground up and usually in addition to a full-time job (or multiple jobs). So I introduced instructional design as a method to the madness, something that would streamline education and training for everyone involved.
And it definitely did. My favorite example comes from a tenet of ID that directs you to create student-centered learning experiences. Pretty much no Russian university course requires what is known in the West as a syllabus; instead, the instructor needs to build something that can be loosely translated as a work program.
In short, it’s a document that can use state-defined numerical codes for skills and qualifications a student is supposed to gain but typically says nothing about office hours, reasonable delays in homework submissions, or a policy on plagiarism. It’s quite hard to write and nearly impossible to read unless you are paid to read it, so it’s no wonder students basically never open it until it’s too late, i.e. when there is already a conflict. ID helped me make my case for proper course descriptions and a syllabus everywhere, in part because you can design it really well too, so the added value is evident.
I went through a bunch of these insights, and I believe one of them – on ‘training the trainers’, or continuous professional development of scicomm instructors, which should be budgeted for but can also be done within existing faculty training – made it directly into the group’s conclusions.
Finally, I briefly talked about going full circle on well-designed courses and creating a case of meta-instruction, when I did a training session on scicomm education at OpenSciComm 2022 in Belgrade. After an extended version of this (8-minute) talk on instructional design that went through the practical tools and even some exercises, I flipped a switch and showed the audience how I had applied ID to that very training session they’d just taken part in. I still think it’s one of the coolest things I’ve designed in scicomm training, and I’d love to do that again.
Which brings me to the way forward: when I chatted about this to a new acquaintance during a break, she told me she’d love to read more about this experience and tips for designing scicomm educational products in a paper. It was nice but also a tiiiny bit heartbreaking because, to me, it sort of cemented this feeling that one does not simply pivot to working as a scicomm/science journalism instructor in Europe without a Ph.D. and a list of publications beyond news and feature stories that Scopus mistakenly thinks are papers.
Oh well, I might need to go back to school, and to the other side of a syllabus no less. Good thing I’m all caught up on the latest journalism research.